In 1987, a senior offensive lineman from Chula Vista High earned honorable mention on California's all-state football team. Joe Heinz spent almost every working year after that in the same corner of San Diego County, and he ended his career overseeing high school sports for the whole region as commissioner of the CIF San Diego Section. He died on September 22, 2026. He was 56.

Heinz finished at Chula Vista High in 1988 and stayed home for college, blocking on the offensive line at San Diego State in the years when Marshall Faulk was carrying the ball for the Aztecs. According to FOX 5 San Diego, he made all-conference there before an ankle injury ended his playing days.

He did not go far. Heinz built his working life in the Sweetwater Union High School District, the South Bay system that includes his own alma mater and whose high schools reach from National City to San Ysidro. By 2020, Cal-Hi Sports counted 27 years he had spent there as a coach and administrator, the last of them as the district's coordinator of athletics. He also served as president of the High School Sports Association.

In 2020 he succeeded Jerry Schniepp as commissioner, becoming only the sixth person to lead the San Diego Section in roughly 60 years. He could hardly have picked a harder moment to start. He took over that summer with games shut down across California by the pandemic, and even before his first official day he helped choose a new assistant commissioner, Todd Cassen, to replace the retiring John Labeta.

"It's definitely been interesting settling into this position in the most unprecedented times in interscholastic athletics," he said that August, as his office worked with athletic directors, coaches and administrators on a revised master calendar for 2020 and 2021. He described the process with evident optimism: "The collaboration and feedback we've had with these groups has been great and we feel confident it presents a great opportunity for our student athletes, coaches, schools, and communities to return to play."

Asked in that same interview about his own years in uniform, he looked past San Diego State entirely. "What I remember most, even more than playing in college, was the games and competition with your neighborhood friends and rivals (in high school)," he said, adding that the mentorship of the coaches he played for had shaped him both personally and professionally.

He was still at it in August 2026, when he stopped by KUSI's Good Morning San Diego ahead of the 28th season of the Prep Pigskin Report. As FOX 5 San Diego recounted, he spoke about the steady growth of prep sports across the section, the pressures facing student-athletes and schools, and the value of educational athletics on and off the field.

What Heinz built is still on the calendar. It lives in the schedule his office drew up to bring the section back to play after the 2020 shutdown, in more than three decades of coaches and athletic directors he worked beside from Sweetwater to the far corners of the county, and in the Friday night games played by teenagers who, like the Chula Vista lineman he once was, may remember their neighborhood rivals longer than anything that comes after.